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All the legislation you might wish for

Thinking of buying property in the south of France or desperate to learn about German anti-discrimination legislation? A website set up by the EU’s Publications Office gives access to the legislation of 22 member states (all except Cyprus, Hungary and Latvia), using a search template that directs users to relevant acts and rules.

N-Lex is aimed at academics, businesses, lawyers, civil servants and citizens in response to a greater demand for information about how other EU states draft law and provide for their citizens.

Information about marriage laws, inheritance and tax are some of the issues which could be of interest to citizens who move to other member states. Civil servants drafting legislation in one member state might also find it useful to know how another member state brought in similar regulations.

“Most of the time problems arise in parallel,” says Pascale Berteloot, head of the Eur-Lex unit in the Publications Office which oversees the project. “If you take energy, for example, we are all facing the same problems on how to reduce the use of energy in heating homes.”

The degree of access to the legislation of the different member states is not uniform but is dependent on what is provided on relevant national websites. Some national websites are run by governments, others by private companies but all information on N-Lex is free of charge.

Some member states have all legislation in full online, dating back more than 100 years, others just include summaries of recent laws. While searches can be done in 11 different languages, the legislation provided is not translated. There are no plans to harmonise the information from the various countries but Berteloot believes the demand for information will prompt progress towards providing legislation in possibly two or three different languages.